Need Advice On MBP Hard Drive Upgrade

hi everyone.
it hasnt beed very long since i bought my MBP, just last november.
it came with the FUJITSU 5400rpm 160GB hard drive.

now, i am thinking about upgrading to a faster and bigger hard drive.
i am really confused about this.
i have seen reviews where the larger (i.e 320GB) 5400rpm are faster than 100-150GB 7200rpm hard drives.

initially i though the spinning speed is all i need for speed. Some people are saying different stuff here.
something also, that thing you call "platter" how can i know how many platters a hard drive has?

i would like people to dumb their experience here on the effect of such larger and faster hard drives on the battery.

so please can you recommend me a hard drive that is guaranteed
1- silent .. quite at least
2- reliable
3- will do the pro things. AE, photoshop, avid. although i have external FW800 so i wont need it for large projects.
4- wont eat my battery.

so please can you recommend me a hard drive that is guaranteed
1- silent .. quite at least
2- reliable
3- will do the pro things. AE, photoshop, avid. although i have external FW800 so i wont need it for large projects.
4- wont eat my battery.

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1- most laptop drives, most likely all on the market today are pretty silent
2- they are pretty much all of equal reliability
3- what hardrive CANT do pro things? (ok maybe the 300gb 4200RPM BTO drive for the MBP, but even that still wouldnt be THAT bad, and photoshop? photoshop dosent use the harddrive at all)
4- again, they pretty much all use about the same battery, though i think the samsung wasent it? is a little better then the WD at battery useage (either way i still get 3-4 hours on battery with my WD 320

so

i'd recomend the WD 320 scorpio, i have it, 95% of the drives i use are WD

if you can wait another month or so the 500gb drives should be available

Apple just replaced my 2.33 mbp with a new 2.4, two changes I made in the switch after over a year of minor annoyance:
1) Ordered a glossy screen.
2) Got the HD upgraded to the Hitachi 7200rpm

Speed: I see relatively no difference when doing everyday computing (but I only have the stock 2gb RAM). The difference I DO see is when I move larger files from my external (also 7200rpm) or to it. This was definitely noticeable when migrating my docs & settings to the new one from Time Machine. About 20 minutes to move 34.7gb of information over FW, whereas when I restored the old computer it took over an hour for the same amount of info. But again, in everyday situations you won't notice much of a difference, but if you move movie files a lot it will definitely pay off to get the 7200 instead of going bigger.

Noise: The old machine had a high-pitched HD that was kind of annoying if you got really close to it. The new one has a deeper sound when the heads spin and is hard to hear unless you concentrate hard.

Battery: When I first brought my old mbp home from the store it would get about 4 hours. Maybe squeeze 20 minutes if wireless/BT off and screen brightness lowest. The new machine out of the box gets 5:30 on medium light with the wireless/BT ON...
Hope this helps, Happy computing.

Apple just replaced my 2.33 mbp with a new 2.4, two changes I made in the switch after over a year of minor annoyance:
1) Ordered a glossy screen.
2) Got the HD upgraded to the 7200rpm

Speed: I see relatively no difference when doing everyday computing (but I only have the stock 2gb RAM). The difference I DO see is when I move larger files from my external (also 7200rpm) or to it. This was definitely noticeable when migrating my docs & settings to the new one from Time Machine. About 20 minutes to move 34.7gb of information over FW, whereas when I restored the old computer it took over an hour for the same amount of info. But again, in everyday situations you won't notice much of a difference, but if you move movie files a lot it will definitely pay off to get the 7200 instead of going bigger.

Noise: The old machine had a high-pitched HD that was kind of annoying if you got really close to it. The new one has a deeper sound when the heads spin and is hard to hear unless you concentrate hard.

Battery: When I first brought my old mbp home from the store it would get about 4 hours. Maybe squeeze 20 minutes if wireless/BT off and screen brightness lowest. The new machine out of the box gets 5:30 on medium light with the wireless/BT ON...
Hope this helps, Happy computing.

Click to expand...

thanks,
i think you have the penryn now and the low power consumption is due to low power consumption by the processor. I am not sure they changed the battery to gain some more up time.

does the MBP supprot SATA300? as it is currently showing 1.5Gbits/s on my MBP system profiler.

so if the sata300 is not supported, i guess i can still use it with half the designed speed?

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It doesn't matter if it supports SATA II or not. It can't saturate the bandwidth for the SATA I anyways. Yes that's the best drive. I've experienced with the different brands and so far the WD drives have been both the most reliable and the quietest. Of course performance-wise I prefer Seagates.

Followed directions on ifixit.com. Hardest part was getting the front part of the upper plate/keyboard trackpad to pop off after all the screws were out. I had to wiggle quite a bit and had to "crack" off the front. Nothing broke but it was a little dicey.

Installing the new drive was a snap after that. Putting it back together was easy. Only trouble was a little gap remained at the front seal above the optical drive slot. I was a little upset about this. But I remembered a post here a month ago stating that he had same problem and he just pushed down hard to fix it. I tried this for few minutes to no avail. By on my last try, I pushed down not at the edge but just behind it. It snapped in place. Perfect.

I can really notice the speed. Seems to function like a 7200 rpm drive. Tomshardware benchmark showed about 30 percent improvement over the fujitsu drive. I think it definitely feels that way.

Followed directions on ifixit.com. Hardest part was getting the front part of the upper plate/keyboard trackpad to pop off after all the screws were out. I had to wiggle quite a bit and had to "crack" off the front. Nothing broke but it was a little dicey.

Installing the new drive was a snap after that. Putting it back together was easy. Only trouble was a little gap remained at the front seal above the optical drive slot. I was a little upset about this. But I remembered a post here a month ago stating that he had same problem and he just pushed down hard to fix it. I tried this for few minutes to no avail. By on my last try, I pushed down not at the edge but just behind it. It snapped in place. Perfect.

I can really notice the speed. Seems to function like a 7200 rpm drive. Tomshardware benchmark showed about 30 percent improvement over the fujitsu drive. I think it definitely feels that way.

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